When Doom first came out...

It was more popular than Windows. What do you think?

Hmm well, most of my circles were computer nerds or gamers already so we heavily anticipated the game, though in that short amount of time ago gaming was still considered a geek hobby and not nearly as ubiquitous as it is now. So I didn't hear about it much outside those people. Since I was behind technologically, I had to wait until it came to my friends before I got my hands on it. We went from outcasts to the dudes that could get anyone a copy of Doom. It mostly spread by word of mouth, since the www was still in infancy to anyone not familiar with it.

I do recall some stories from my older sister, who was working at the university at the time and Doom got huge on their computer network, even among the older guys who weren't gamer types at all.

It quickly was banned on the school network, and I also recall the computer lab supervisors talking about it. John Carmack once pointed out that graphically it came at a time when even a laymen could walk by the screen and tell what was happening, the game was realistic enough to leave an impression on anyone.

@Feirup, It was still somewhat controversial until around 2000. It sounds like we're the same age but I once got in trouble for drawing a Doom logo at school when I was 7-8 years old. For a short while people bought into that "Doom caused columbine" crap but most people saw that was bs relatively quickly. Others older than me can probably shed more light on it, but I can safely say schools and school staff seemed to hate it.

I didn't get to play it until 1994 since my system had 2MB of RAM at the time. When I got Ultimate Doom in 1995-6, I had a feasible system to play without seeing the occasional blue disk for 30 seconds or so.

I was 12 in 1994 and 13-14 in 1995-6, the latter being when I was started tinkering with WAD files.

I got Doom 1 in February of 94, but had already heard lots about the game. This in itself was remarkable because it was 1993/1994 where the web as we know it didn't exist in any meaningful sense, and to add to that I was living in a redneck 100-miles-north-of-nowhere tiny town in Sweden. Yet everyone had heard of Doom.

There was probably controversy, but for the most part I ignored that. But I'll admit actually feeling a bit uneasy when I found the swastika in E1M4 (this was Doom v1.1, it was altered for 1.666 IIRC).

Only a few of us at school had computers that could run it well and in the spring of 1994 I got my first editor off of a cover disk from some UK gaming magazine. A girl a year older than me had a tricked out 486 DX2 66MHz that ran the game smooth as butter, so we'd hang out there and people would watch me build levels and then play them, or see me demo stuff I had built at home and brought over on disks. Even her parents were curious, they'd never seen anything like that but I imagine it's not what they had in mind when they bought the (at the time) very expensive computer.

So yeah, Doom was everywhere.

ukiro said:

(this was Doom v1.1, it was altered for 1.666 IIRC).

It was actually modified for 1.4.

They blamed Columbine on Doom so it certainly made a pop culture impact outside of the gaming circle, six years after release.

For a long time, all other FPS games were called Doom clones.

I remember that it was a total hit, it was 3D! (you know, sort of). You had the feeling of moving in a "REAL 3d space", and it was FAST (remember the kind of computers we had back those days).

I remember I got the demo from a game magazine (don't remember the name of the mag) and after playing the demo I went to buy the game... diskettes, of course, and then you just couldn't stop playing over an over and over the levels, then I got interested in the secrets of the maps and try to discovered all of them in each map. Playing again each map, over and over... :)

Remember how hard was at the begining to play that "madness", and the music, and the enemies sounds, everything was SO NEW, and so far away in the future (put that in context, please) that for many years was THE GAME, at least for me. :)

Then, one day, don't remember the year, a map editor showed up, it was msdos as I recall, but that is another story, hehehehe.

Doom certainly got near the top of the list whenever the ongoing violent-videogames-and-how-bad-they-must-be-for-you discussions flared up, which they did periodically in the media back then. Violent games/shooters hadn't become as mainstream a phenomenon yet, nor accepted into mass culture like it is these days. Mortal Kombat probably continued to be the main offender for the against-camp, but Doom certainly started getting mentioned in the same breath, as was its claimed "satanic content" (hey, its demonic, not satanic!).

I don't think any of the really large media outlets made a campaign for/against Doom, though a dislike against it seemed to simmer underneath in smaller established channels. You had parents groups voicing out against it, politicians warning about it in the context of violent videogamnes and whatnot. In its defense was usually brought up that other new cultural phenomena were also known for getting a bad rep from (struggling?) parents, like rock'n'roll and the comics code in the 50s, Dungeons & Dragons after that and Marilyn Manson after that. There's always something to point the finger on, and Doom certainly became one of those things, long before Columbine.

Doom references could not only be found in E.R. and Friends, but both Cracked and Mad Magazine poked fun at the franchise, plus both kids and adults alike were talking about it. We were quick to compare "Event Horizon" and "Starship Troopers" to Doom's morbid, bloody atmosphere. My dad played it and installed it on a couple of friends' machines. It really was a big deal for a minute. Too bad a lot of my peers quickly moved on when Quake, Goldeneye and Turok came out; suddenly Doom was old hat.

When my friend introduced me to Event Horizon, the way she described it was it's the Doom Movie that the Doom Movie should have been.

When Doom came out...

- gamers were thrilled and excited about some technological revolution to gaming.
- conservative politicians were up in arms, decrying the end of civilization (as they always have done when something controversial was threatening their backwards-minded beliefs.)

Politicians? I thought it was only the religious fanatics fussing over it.

The first time I saw Doom I was like holy shit, is that even legal ?? You've got to consider that the most realistic FPS games before that were games like Wolfenstein and Catacomb Abyss. It seemed so real that when you stopped playing, you got this weird motion sickness. It was such a huge improvement graphically.

And yeah it was offensive. A lot of people seemed to really hate it and wanted to ban it. Some parents grounded their kids because they found them with a copy. At the time it was really fearsome, there was nothing like it.

I was too young when the first doom came out, but during my younger days i remember that pretty much all the "game demos" CD's that i owned, had the Doom shareware (using Doom 95), and one of my older cousins had the SNES port, which he made it seem like a big deal since he just kept talking about how violent the game was and how i shouldn't tell anyone that he had the game. In a way it was like telling someone that you have a snuff film or something like that.